Lorenzo sometimes took part in the meetings of the learned society, which he was fond of summoning to Careggi, being less disturbed there than in the city. In both places the Symposia were renewed which, according to Alexandrian tradition, were to celebrate the day of Plato’s birth and death (November 7). Marsilio Ficino has described one of these banquets which took place under the presidency either of Lorenzo or Francesco Bandini.[116] Among the guests were Marsilio and his father, Landino, Antonio degli Agli Bishop of Fiesole, Carlo and Cristoforo Marsuppini, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Bernardo Nuzzi, and Tommaso Benci. The academical celebration or exercise succeeded the repast. Plato’s ‘Symposion’—the book which treats of the tokens of love at similar happy meetings, and a commentary on which Marsilio furnished in his treatise on love—was used as a starting-point for free disputation, the parts being divided among the persons present. Giovanni Cavalcanti developed the ‘Phædro,’ and showed how the birth of Eros from the conjunction of the earth with chaos, amid the throes of creation and the struggle for light, signified the original motive force of all that is good, noble, and beautiful in mankind. With this discourse was connected the exposition, also allotted to Cavalcanti, of the speech of Pausanias on the double Aphrodite, and Urania; on the distinction and confusion between moral and physical affections, their emanation, extension, stages of purification, and participation in the manifold forces of nature. Landino undertook to explain the speech of Aristophanes. According to this, love is the never-sleeping longing of man for a return to his former state of oneness with the Divine, from which Zeus, in wrath, had divided him by means of his earthly form and by sin. To Carlo Marsuppini fell the discourse of Agathon, which glorifies the qualities of the god who is at once so various and yet blends all variety into unity. Tommaso Benci devoted himself to pointing out the connection between the Christian view and the supposed inspired words of the priestess Diotima, who disclosed to Socrates the nature of a love that raises man to the highest good or sinks him to the lowest depths of evil. Cristoforo Marsuppini undertook to bring into harmony with the Socratic doctrine of Love the poems of Guido Cavalcanti, to which, as an emanation of Greek philosophy in the arena of the new-born Italian literature, great importance was attached by contemporaries, especially by Lorenzo de’ Medici. Such were the occupations of these famous assemblies. Their positive scientific results were not great, yet they afford a brilliant testimony to the cultivation which enabled the upper classes in Florence to take part in the noblest intellectual efforts.